King Francis I of France and the Renaissance The Florentine Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century was slow to move up into continental Europe where a rich Mediaeval architectural and artistic heritage still dominated society. Monarchs were slow to adapt new styles of art, architecture and culture, although they were enthusiastically participating in the scholarly rediscovery of the Classical past by studying ancient languages and collecting rare manuscripts. Things speeded up dramatically with the invention of printing in the 1460s and this new access not only to Classical literature, but the Bible itself, would lead to cataclysmic changes in the religious life of the countries and territories that made up the…

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA, AND ILE SAINT JEAN IN PARTICULAR 1492 is famous for Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America while he was in the employ of the Spanish king and queen. In the following ten years, it is believed, about 80 more voyages by different explorers and nations were made, searching for the elusive short route to the Far East, and all its riches. No one had any idea of the size of the North and South American continents. In the end, except for an always optimistic hope for a Northwest Passage, a realistic route to the East was abandoned in favour of robbing the Meso- and South American aboriginal…

The Appearance of the Mi’kmaq So far most of our images of what the indigenous people looked like was in the Eighteenth Century engravings found in the travel books of the time. The aboriginals were Europeanised by being presented in the pose of the Apollo of the Belvedere, a Roman statue possibly from the time of the Emperor Hadrian. These engraved pictures, sometimes with outlandish vegetation, were created largely from the imagination of the artists, helped perhaps by descriptions written by the early explorers. So imprecise was their knowledge of what they were illustrating that the Mi’kmaq on the right is labelled “Acadian man” and not “sauvage” as you would…

We are fortunate that quite early on explorers and colonisers began to write things down about the Mi’kmaq which have survived. They are mentioned here and there in various travel accounts from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries and from those brief descriptions, such as you read in Verrazano, you get the idea that different groups, Mi’kmaq or not, had quite different personalities and exhibited various forms of behaviour. This was discussed an an earlier blog post. A French explorer, former soldier and coloniser called Nicolas Denys (1598? – 1688) came to New France, long called Acadia, in 1632 as a coloniser, and indeed he set up settlements in a…

In my last post I talked about what I called the Archaic Period, spanning perhaps 8,000-3,000 years BP. It was a time of climate change which meant a change in how people fed themselves, clothed themselves and how and where they lived. This influenced the kinds of tools and weapons they needed to survive and making sense of all these artefacts and putting them into some kind of order is almost impossible with the present level of our knowledge. I had explained that I preferred to call the period “Archaic” rather than Pre-Ceramic because the people most likely to have populated the Island were a group called by that name,…